The third edition of my bare bones executive summary of everything I think is worth knowing in AI/tech from the previous week. I’m a week behind, due to a busy schedule. This week’s cover image prompt: “The famous evolution of man chart but it’s a computer evolving into a man” using Dall-E 3.
Executive Summary
- Augmented reality might finally have its moment: Apple goggles let you work in your car on dual monitors. Mixed reality portals in your living room.
- Generative video is moving quickly. Face swapping, voice cloning, translation, deep fakes. What is striking this week is that it’s available to everyone, quick, and cheap.
Those topics and more, in this week’s AI update.
Top Three Links
If you only click three things… these are the three:
#1 “What is even real anymore? Last year — none of this was even possible for me. Last night — I made this in a few hours. Next year, real vs AI-assisted will be completely indistinguishable.”
#2 “It’s the closest thing we have to teleportation”
#3 “Create a Midjourney Character, then BECOME that character.”
The Rest: AI News of The Week
Don’t let the volume overwhelm you. Have fun and skim it. The links are organized by topic, sorted from ‘coolest’ to ‘least cool’, and each topic is clearly defined with a headline. I do the work so you don’t have to! The links descriptions are often pulled directly from tweets or articles, so it’s not always my voice. Pause when you see something that interests you. Reach out to me any time. I enjoy sharing and discussing these items!
Design/Imagery
MidJourney 4x upscaling is absolutely smoking Dalle 3 for high res photorealism.
My personal testing with Dalle3 prompting shows that Chat GPT can use a source image (see below… and then create derivatives, saving a lot of time figuring out prompts.
Source image… modified to be a bear instead of the main character of Army of Darkness, without human guidance.
“Self-generated” GPT image with the same general idea, but with a bear.
Automating lighting is coming along quickly. “The quality of relighting you can do with AI is pretty amazing. So much potential for virtual sets and visual effects. Segmented the video and inferred PBR textures locally using SwitchLight Studio (on an NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU).”
Buzzword To Know: Gausian Splatting is a HOT topic.
A tree bursts into flame from a photograph
“Creation and destruction – dissolving #GaussianSplatting in Unity”
Multimodal (aka when Chatbots can see and hear, beyond chatting)
“ChatGPT-4V Multimodal decodes a Redacted government document on a UFO sighting released by NASA. I have tested this on 100s of redacted documents and I can say we are in a new world.”
Meta AI Mind-Reading
“Today we’re sharing new research that brings us one step closer to real-time decoding of image perception from brain activity. Using MEG, this AI system can decode the unfolding of visual representations in the brain with an unprecedented temporal resolution.”
AGI (aka Artificial General Intelligence – ‘when computers quantitatively out-perform humans at… everything’)
OpenAI has quietly changed its ‘Core values’ to emphasize the development of AGI. “Anything that doesn’t help with that [building AGI] is out of scope.”
AR/VR
Using Apple AR goggles to work in a car on quadruple virtual HD monitors
AR navigation of a store
Language/Audio
“NYC Mayor Eric Adams reportedly deployed AI tools to make robocalls to residents in languages that he doesn’t actually speak. “
“YouTube is reportedly seeking rights to train an AI tool to clone musicians’ voices — legally allowing creators to generate songs mimicking artists.”
Embodiment (aka robots)
Amazon Bipedal Robot
Ehang just received approval for fully autonomous flights of its electric air taxi in China.
Can GPT-4 teach a robot hand to do pen spinning tricks better than you do?
Talking with a drone. Introducing GRID: the General Robot Intelligence Development platform, designed for prototyping smart and safe robots rapidly using foundation models, LLMs, and simulation.
Applied Business for AI
Contract red-lining – Ironclad ($15k/year for small to mid-size business)
https://openai.com/customer-stories/ironclad
Man trains home cameras to help repel badgers and foxes
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67053171
Agency (aka when a chat bot can do things in the real world)
Another AI assistant that can surf the web on your behalf – example of ordering foodhttps://twitter.com/mattshumer_/status/1715104864244576743
Chips/Hardware/Architecture
John Willis – The Anatomy of an LLM
‘Mind-blowing’ IBM chip speeds up AI
IBM’s NorthPole processor side steps need to access external memory, boosting computing power and saving energy.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03267-0
NVIDIA Partners With Foxconn to Build Factories and Systems for the AI Industrial Revolution
Llemma: An Open Language Model For Mathematics
Leave a Reply